Facebook is opening an artificial intelligence laboratory in Paris. This move could increase the presence of the social media site on the European continent, just as leaders there are starting to take more interest in actions of the corporation.
The Facebook AI Research (FAIR) program, under which the AI center is being developed, has been in place for more than a year. The FAIR program is aimed at designing artificial intelligence applications that will sort through photographs, video and text to deliver more relevant information to users.
"Today we announced that we're expanding those efforts with a new AI research team in Paris. Like the existing FAIR teams in Menlo Park and New York, the Paris team will work on ambitious long-term research projects in image recognition, natural language processing, speech recognition and the kinds of physical and logical infrastructure required to run these AI systems," Facebook officials stated.
The social media company hopes that research developed in this lab and others will improve the performance of its social media applications, including photos, news feed and search functions.
Paris was chosen as the site of the new AI research center due to the presence of large numbers of capable scientists and engineers in the area. A total of six researchers will initially be working at the center, a number that will double by the end of 2015.
Artificial intelligence research is still in its infancy at Facebook, but the corporation expressed its interest in furthering knowledge on the subject.
"Our work in AI research is still relatively early. But we've built a terrific team and have already made some encouraging progress, and we're excited to see where this work takes us and what it will allow us to build for the people we serve," Facebook officials declared in a company statement.
Government officials in Germany, France and Belgium are currently investigating if Facebook violated a privacy agreement announced in 2014.
Facebook has 1.4 billion users and owns the photo-sharing service Instagram as well as the WhatsApp messaging service with hundreds of millions of subscribers. The number of people using Facebook in Europe doubled over the last five years.
Artificial intelligence has raised controversy in recent years, as many well-known scientists, including famed physicist Stephen Hawking, have warned of dire consequences if machines become too intelligent.
"We have a long way to go to make machines as intelligent as we'd like them to be, and there are technical hurdles that we don't yet know how to solve. Human-level AI is very far down the line — it will be several decades," Yann LeCun, leader of Facebook's AI research team, said.
Photo: R.E. Barber Photography | Flickr
